If you’ve already used up the 15GB of storage that comes with your free Gmail account, you’re in good company. Who hasn’t had their inbox filled with junk mail? Even if you delete a few spam emails or unsubscribe from newsletters you no longer read, you may still have hundreds of thousands of unread messages to go through and delete.
Maybe you’ve been meaning to clean out your Gmail inbox for a long time, but the thought of having to go through countless old messages is daunting. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to free up space in your Google account and still keep all your old emails.
All you need to do is create a second Gmail account to store all your current messages. There is no limit to the number of free Google accounts you can have, meaning you can set one up as a dedicated archive account and then transfer all your old emails to it.
Transferring your Gmail messages is also a good strategy if you have a Gmail account for school or work that you can’t access permanently. Most universities and companies deactivate your account once you’re no longer a student or employee, so if you want to view your old messages and files, you’ll need to transfer them to a personal account before you lose access.
The entire process of transferring your Gmail messages to a new account does not take to long, but it depends on how many messages you have. We’ll walk you through the simple process of transferring your email from your old account to a new one (including the important step of backing everything up beforehand).
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How much data can you store on Gmail?
Fifteen gigabytes of free storage might sound like a lot when you set up a Gmail account, but the space fills up quickly. First of all, the 15 GB isn’t just used for email: it also includes the files you have stored in your Google Drive and Google Photos.
If you frequently send or receive messages that contain large files such as videos, or if you upload a lot of pictures and videos to your Google Photos, you will soon see the “Account storage is full” notification. This means that you will no longer be able to send or receive emails with this account, so you should take action as soon as possible.
The quickest solution is to upgrade to a Google One account, but even if you go for the cheapest plan—100GB for $20/year—you’ll still end up paying money to store old emails you may no longer need.
If you don’t want to buy extra storage, you can always delete your old emails. You can reclaim a surprising amount of space by moving large files to the trash. Gmail makes it easy to identify and delete files based on their size. Still, this option can seem tedious; perhaps you don’t want to spend hours going through correspondence from ten years ago or more, deciding which memories to keep and which to get rid of forever.
You always have the option to download large files to your desktop before deleting them from your Google account, but at some point you will probably run into the same problem with your local files and need to manage storage space on your device.
Which brings us to our “nuclear option”: transfer all your email to a new Gmail account.
How to transfer your Gmail messages to a new email account
Before you begin the Gmail transfer, we recommend that you back up your emails. You can do this by downloading your emails either to your computer or an external hard drive. You can delete the backup copy after you transfer the emails to your new account if you want, but it’s always a good idea to keep an extra copy stored locally.
To back up your Gmail messages, go to Google Takeout. With our test Gmail account, which contained about 75,000 messages, we were able to complete a download from Google Takeout in about 2 hours.
Once you have saved a copy of your emails, you can begin the transfer. Here are the steps you need to follow:
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First, log in to your original Gmail account, click the gear icon in the top right corner, and then click Show all settings.
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Select the Forwarding POP/IMAP and then select the option Enable POP for all emails (POP stands for Post Office Protocol).
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You have several options under When accessing messages via POPTo automatically delete the emails from your original account after the transfer, select Delete copy of Gmail.
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Choose save Changes.
Now it’s time to create your new account and transfer all your messages there:
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Create your brand new Gmail account with an empty inbox if you haven’t already—we’ll call it your archive account.
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Log in to your new archive account, click the gear icon at the top and select Show all settings.
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Select the Accounts and import and then select Add email account next to Retrieve emails from other accounts.
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In the pop-up window, enter the name of your original Gmail account. Select Next.
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Choose Import emails from my other account (POP3)Andchoose Next again.
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Enter the password of your original Gmail account. You may also need to create a password for the Google app (see note below).
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Choose 995 under Port.
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Check these 3 boxes: Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving emails, Mark incoming messages, Archive incoming messages (skip inbox)
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Choose Add Account.
You will probably need to create a Google app password to transfer Gmail messages
We tested this Gmail message transfer process twice and both times the default password for the Gmail accounts did not work. After some research, we concluded that we need to create a temporary “app password” to sync the accounts.
Google app passwords are 16-character passcodes created for “less secure” apps or devices to access your Google account. They work just like your Google password.
If your regular Google password doesn’t work for syncing Gmail accounts, visit https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords to create an app password. Just give the password a name – we used “Bulk Email Transfer” – then click the “Create” button. You’ll get a pop-up window with your new 16-digit passcode.
After you create the app password, go back to step 6 of the instructions above and use this new app password instead of your usual password.
Important: Google only shows your app password once, and once you create it, you can’t ask it to show it again, so be sure to write it down or otherwise record it after it’s created.
The Google Help Center states that “app passwords are not recommended and are unnecessary in most cases.” Once you’re done transferring your Gmail messages, we recommend that you delete your app password.
What happens after my Gmail accounts are synced?
Once you’ve successfully linked your new Gmail archive account to your original account, your emails should be transferred automatically. The process may take several hours or days, depending on how many emails you have.
In our test account with about 75,000 messages, we found that it took Gmail about two full days to transfer all messages from the original account to the new archived email account.
Important: After you transfer your Gmail messages to your archived email account, all of those messages from your original Gmail account will be moved to the Trash folder, which you will need to empty manually. It took about an hour to delete those 75,000 messages from the Trash folder.
Before transferring Gmail messages, our test account used just over 12GB, or 80% of Google’s free 15GB. After the transfer, the account used just 0.66GB, of which 0.06GB was from Gmail.
Which Gmail messages are not transferred?
We found that Gmail transferred all of our messages except for two categories – drafts and spam.
You have to decide manually what to do with your drafts. Spam messages are automatically deleted every 30 days, so you can let Gmail do it for you, or you can go to the spam folder yourself after your emails have been transferred and delete or forward those messages.
Once all your emails have been imported into your new account, you can enjoy the empty inbox. You have breathed new life into your original account.
At this point, there are two final steps required: you’ll want to stop the automatic transfer process so you can continue using your original account, and you’ll want to delete the app password if you had to create one.
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Log in to your new account, go to your Settings and select Show all settings.
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Select the Accounts and import and then select delete for your original account (under Retrieve emails from other accounts.)
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If you are prompted Confirm deletion of the mail accountchoose OK.
If you had to create a Google app password and now want to delete it, go back to https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords and click the trash can icon next to the password you created.
Congratulations, you’re done!
One final important note: Google deletes accounts that have been inactive for more than two years, so be careful not to completely ignore all of your old emails after the transfer. If you don’t plan on using your archive account to send emails on a regular basis, you can still keep the account active by logging in at least once every two years.
